Lamarck's Evolution

Broadcast:

Friday 29 August 2008 5:55PM

Ross Honeywill looks at the man science and history forgot, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. Not only did Lamarck create the first comprehensive theory of evolution, before Darwin, but his profound influence on a young immunologist lead to yet another scientific breakthrough.

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A popular science writer once famously said, 'If something is true, no amount of wishing can make it untrue'.

Keep that in mind as we take this brief journey together.

About thirty years ago a young Australian scientist was sitting on a flight between Canada and Europe reading a book by the philosopher and science writer, Arthur Koestler. While reading this fascinating book, the young Ted Steele discovered a name that he'd never heard before...and that name was Lamarck - the Frenchman who created the first comprehensive theory of evolution: predating Charles Darwin by 50 years.

By delicious coincidence, next year is Darwin's 200th birthday and two hundred years since Lamarck developed his now infamous theory of evolution.

Now it wasn't as if the young Ted Steele knew nothing about science. He was already a respected molecular immunologist, and this moment, flying between Toronto and Frankfurt, was to change Ted Steele's life forever - just as it changed the course of history for Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck.

Over the coming decades Steele would work as a research scientist in Canada, Britain and Australia with some of the most brilliant and controversial minds in the scientific community.

Ted Steele's fatal flaw was that at this moment in mid-air he fell in love with the purity and logic of Lamarck. But Lamarck's name had already become a byword for discredited beliefs. He was seen by many as a joke. So, despite his brilliance and originality, Ted Steele was to spend the next thirty years being marginalised, vilified, even ostracised by the scientific community around the world. But he never flinched. He never once blinked. And that was his great strength and his fatal weakness.

Ted Steele knew that Lamarck was right - despite the suffocating weight of the scientific establishment. For Ted Steele, there was no choice!

What Steele fell in love with was Lamarck's grand idea that during our own lifetimes, we can acquire new abilities, and then transmit them on, so that our sons and daughters are born already hardwired with the improvements or immunities that helped us survive and thrive . The revolutionary Lamarck gave evolutionary theory a sense of direction.

Darwin was also revolutionary - and a great supporter of Lamarck. Latter-day neo-Darwinists on the other hand, believe that genetic change is entirely random and that every improvement of a lifetime is lost at the final closing of the eyes. They believe that our lives have no influence on evolution and are the result of a random past rather than the cause of a better future.Ted Steele embraced Lamarck and proposed that changes are not only subject to random chance, but that we also pass improvements from our lives on to our children: enhancements such as stronger immunity. But he had no proof, no hard scientific evidence.

When he returned to Canada thirty years ago, he and a colleague produced the evidence that acquired immunity could indeed alter genes for transmission to future generations. And in doing so, Ted Steele crossed the scientific fault-line.

He believed he had proved Lamarck correct. But the subsequent struggle to convince the British scientific establishment of his breakthrough cost him his stellar career path and his reputation. His evidence was discredited. He was attacked, sacked and derided. But still Ted Steele pushed on, decade after decade, with a determination that many thought madness.

Finally, in 2006, riding the wave of new evidence coming from across the globe, a respected Italian geneticist and an American molecular biologists separately and unequivocally delivered scientific proof that characteristics acquired during a lifetime are passed on to sons and daughters.

Both Lamarck and Darwin were great men. They gave us an understanding of evolution and that changed our view of the world around us-from a place that was considered static to a universe filled with change. We now know that the continents beneath our feet are moving, that the universe itself is expanding, that life is changing, that we're evolving, that we're descended from ancestors with apes as cousins. For all this we are grateful to them both for making evolution a scientific fact.

And we're grateful to the indefatigable Ted Steele for putting a new kind of evolutionary understanding on the world stage - a kind of meta-Lamarckism that combines the best of both Darwin & Lamarck.

After two centuries of genius and jealousy, today, on the eve of their anniversaries, we have a new scientific truth. And no amount of wishing can make it untrue.